50 cars you didn't know are made in Mexico - TARIFFS

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Last year, car companies made 2.7 million vehicles in Mexico to ship north and sell in America—Chevy Silverados, Ford Mavericks, BMW M2s, Nissan Sentras, Audi Q5s, and dozens of other models. Nearly a fifth of the entire market in 2024. Starting next week, they’ll all be hit with a 25% tariff.

Whether you agree with the decision or not, it’s going to have a huge impact on the American auto industry, new car prices, and the models that actually get sold here. That’s because over the last 20 years, Mexico has become a massive hub for car manufacturing. Labor and land are a lot cheaper than in America, and previous free trade agreements like NAFTA and USMCA allowed automakers to build factories in Mexico and ship cars up to sell in the US tax-free.

It’s not just American car companies either—nearly every major brand around the world has done it to get cheap access to the US market. Most people don’t know just how many models are actually built in Mexico. And because of that, the 25% tariff won’t just make those cars more expensive. It’ll make almost every single new car more expensive, as automakers will have to spread around the cost across their entire lineups or drop models entirely.

Whether tariffs will succeed in forcing car companies to move manufacturing back to the US, what’s undeniable is the huge short term change they’ll cause. We know this because we’ve done it before—in the 1960s, America enacted a 25% tariff on pickup trucks not built in the US that’s still in place. And it’s the reason pickup trucks here are so wildly different than the rest of the world.

0:00 25% tariffs are here
0:56 Stellantis in Mexico
2:17 How NAFTA changed everything
4:05 GM in Mexico
5:03 Ford in Mexico
5:54 Will tariffs work?
8:44 Audi and BMW in Mexico
9:33 Honda, Mazda, and KIA
10:43 The Chicken Tax
11:51 From Toyota to Tesla
13:52 What happens next

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